


Where bones were made to weep

by scribblemyname



Series: Be Compromised 2014 Promptathon [3]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Backstory, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Abuse, Community: be_compromised, Defection, Drinking, Established Relationship, F/M, Fantasy AU, Firebird, In Vino Veritas, Red Room, Romance, SHIELD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-19
Updated: 2014-08-19
Packaged: 2018-02-12 05:52:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2098074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblemyname/pseuds/scribblemyname
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha does not know that she was once a little girl. She only thinks it, dreams it like the smoke of a flame, the bright gleam of a firebird in the dark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where bones were made to weep

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inkvoices](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkvoices/gifts).



> Prompt by inkvoices: [Holy water cannot help you now See I've come to burn your kingdom down ~ Seven Devils by Florence and the Machine](http://be-compromised.livejournal.com/412023.html?thread=7723127#t7723127)
> 
> Much gratitude to lithiumlaughter for betaing this for me.

They threw her out of a burning building, and that was the beginning.

* * *

"Where were you when the Great Strangeness began?" is the common drinking question when agents gather in bars after fighting the good fight by day.

Natasha always wants to laugh as she drowns the words away in a shot of good Russian vodka. She feels Clint's knee bump hers under the table and ignores it.

"It began before we knew," she says once, slurring a little, in Russian. She is drunk after Sao Paulo. Clint dragged her halfway across the country for a month to take away the sting, but it wasn't enough, and now she sits with truths clawing out from under her skin. "None of us were born."

Maria and Sharon look uncomfortable. Phil looks politely interested, but he isn't. She knows this. None of the three of them speak Russian.

Clint though. He sits beside her and sips from his beer laced with the scent of dust and scorched ash and water, and she wants to kiss his mouth and taste its burn. He knows Russian, and he knows what she has said. By his silence, she knows he is very interested indeed.

* * *

Children arrived by the dozens, but the instructors weeded out the boys early. "America is making boys into monsters. We shall show them even our girls are stronger."

The Russian comrades watched as the little girls learned under their instructors; they watched the blood spill in darkness and the white light of fire begin to spill out from open wounds.

Natasha would listen to the weeping as she stared at the agonizing cuts on her arms. She did not weep. She felt the Strangeness take root in her bones and make her strong.

* * *

Clint always tastes a bit like burning, and that is why she likes his flavor.

* * *

Gnarled tree trunks unfurled smoke dark branches to cover the sky. The little girl with the flame red hair, Natalia, the Black Widow, hugged the deadly bark and breathed its poisonous scent in wild places, for that is where the Red Room always grew, where the Great Strangeness began.

She wondered sometimes which came first, the Room and the girls with brilliant light and fire breaking inside their flesh or the Great Strangeness creeping over the face of all the earth on every continent. Which struck the match? As a little girl, she did not know. As a woman, she does not care.

* * *

"Tell me something," his low voice rasps in the dark of their quiet room aboard the Helicarrier.

Up here, held aloft by wings and blessings, she feels safe within the comfort of his arms. It is enough to lower her walls a notch and let her breath and words slip out, drunk with uncautious intimacy and the buzz of vodka. "I was a little girl once," she says.

Clint knows this. All women were once little girls.

But Natasha... Natasha does not know this. She knows the wild places born and beating in her blood with a thrumming knowledge he cannot share. She does not know that she was once a little girl. She only thinks it, dreams it like the smoke of a flame, the bright gleam of a firebird in the dark.

"They told us stories of the feather that lit the night." Natasha lifts her head and squints to make out his focused gaze. "You remember the story?" she asks, though she does not know if he has ever heard it. "You remember, right? Da. You must."

She lays her head back down on his chest and sighs as she slides her arm across him. His fingers tap a pattern against her spine.

"Have you ever wondered," she breathes, unwisely, imprudently, "which struck the match?"

* * *

There is an American expression that says it is not wise to play with fire.

* * *

There were twenty-seven girls, twenty-seven young black widows before Natalia became the strongest. There were twenty-seven girls trained to fight, to kill, and to ply the skills of politics and espionage. There were twenty-seven girls born of violence and of fire.

Natalia learned the stories of the firebird, and there were so many. She knew a few things struck as truths inside the monster growing beneath her skin; she knew that Russians were right to call its captors cursed and right to claim a blessing if they freed a girl from harm. She feared the falcon known as death, but perhaps he had not yet been born.

Bars could hold a firebird, but silver did not hurt her. Holy water stung and made the creature inside her rise to the surface, but it did not stop her, did not fight against her power. It made her stronger. She tested herself against wards and felt their power hum harmless on her skin. She cut herself with silver and copper blades. She prayed blessings and exorcisms over her body and challenged another girl to do it to her.

Harmless.

Natalia was deadly because they made her. She was a curse against her maker.

* * *

She wakes up with a pounding migraine and wonders exactly how much did she drink. Natasha has not been hungover in her life.

Clint chuckles at her misery. "Serves you right for drinking two bottles."

She groans and covers her eyes with his pillow to smother out the light of a new morning.

"Marching orders, Nat."

Russian swear words come to her, but she passes them by in favor of English, rips the pillow from her eyes, and glares at him. "You should never have talked me into this."

She means SHIELD. He knows she means nothing.

He leans over, kisses her, and she remembers the ill-advised confidences of the night before.

"Clint," she begins, but he shakes his head, kisses her again.

"Don't worry about it."

So she doesn't.

* * *

Her family threw her out of a burning building, and that was the beginning. Natalia never knew which ones, whether father or mother, only that they died in the fire where she was born.

Natalia Alianovna Romanova was born in the fire that crushed her family's Russian village into ash. She was born at the whim of the Great Strangeness wiping out the rural places, and her family threw her down into the arms of a waiting soldier, Petrovych, a comrade of the Red Room.

The Black Widow was born in the Red Room, written in numbers and computer graphs, wires and electricity dancing over nerve endings to write and rewrite her brain. She was trained with brutality and blood among her twenty-six sisters. She watched in fiery pain as the light of a firebird broke her skin and bled from her wounds, but she did not scream.

A woman with flame red hair and no name, born from the wild places, owed the place of her birth a debt. There was red in her ledger, and she knew how to wipe it out.

* * *

Clint never asks questions when he wants to know the answer; it leaves her too much room to not provide it. He asks questions when he thinks she needs it or if they need it, but not for himself. She knows this, and it is no reassurance to her secrets when he refuses to ask anything at all.

Natasha rarely thinks about it, but today, as she straps herself into a Quinjet and watches her partner fly them out over the ocean, she realizes he has never asked her directly if she is still human or if she has ever been changed. He has never asked her what happened to the ones who trained her.

It starts an itch under her skin. She stares out at the sky and thinks it smells like smoke.

* * *

There is a saying in Russia, Draw not your bow 'til your arrow is fixed.

Clint abides more by the Russian aphorisms than the American.

* * *

Holy water could not save them. Silver bullets from polished guns could not spare their lives.

They had broken Natalia and fashioned her into a creature no longer human and painted her in blood. They had used her to kill her sisters and to make the Russia of their choosing. They gave her orders she was no longer willing to obey.

She came with fire and brightness. She came with vengeance for the years of life they had stolen from her. She opened her mouth and split open her veins with the cold hatred two decades of being their weapon had created.

A firebird scream rent the night air, and one more settlement returned to the wild places.

* * *

"Clint," she says softly in the night, voice heavy with the weight of dreams. "Where were you when the Great Strangeness began?"

His arm is wrapped around her body and he pulls her closer against him, breath soft and warm against her brow. "I was being born."


End file.
